Moderate Republican John Kasich™ is at it again.
The People’s Veep!
Always great when you can keep pace with Mississippi and West Virginia!
This phrasing is a bit misleading perhaps. The bill that Kasich signed had no impact on the vast majority of abortions in Ohio. It’s something like 15% of them, and as stated, it has exceptions for the woman’s health.
The reality is though, yeah, Kasich is pro life. But he’s not the most extreme on that, as evident by his veto of the heartbeat bill.
Perhaps the reason this kind of thing doesn’t have that much impact on me, is that abortion isn’t a strong driver of my vote, either way. There are more important issues to me, that affect way more people. But yeah, if you are a single issue voter on pro choice, then Kasich is not your guy.
For every baby saved by the abortion ban is a new opportunity to groom a left wing voter. We can turn their abortion bans against them. All it will take is time.
The reason this kind of thing has an impact on me is because it has a huge impact on the lives of others that are faced with these situations. Empathy. Compassion.
Lots of things have huge impacts on the lives of others.
To be clear, I’m not saying you are dumb or bad for having this be a disqualifying thing for you. I’m just saying it’s not for me.
It’s a relatively tiny number of people affected. I use the same argument when it comes to things like late term abortions… They are pretty horrific, and i find them morally problematic… but they are also a fairly trivial number of procedures, so I’m not going to use that as my driving factor in my vote.
If someone were to try to ban all abortions, at that point it becomes an issue for me, because i feel like that kind of move creates a major problem for a lot of women, and with very little rational justification. A cluster of cells doesn’t mean anything to me.
Again, I’m neither pro life nor pro choice in any absolute sense of the word.
I mean, the reason he vetoed the heartbeat bill is because he felt it had already been considered unconstitutional (and would be overturned)… so he settled for a bill that puts us on-par with Mississippi and West Virginia. And I suppose you’re right that it wasn’t a flat ban on abortions after a certain date - just a ban on the safest way.
The man is no moderate. He just isn’t a raging lunatic, so the bar keeps being moved. I’m not moving the bar though because the GOP sank their party with crazies.
Who would you consider to be the most moderate Republican?
Pro-life people want to ban all abortions. That would impact something on the order of a million people per year. It’s not a small number. Pretending that their trial bills that nibble around the edges are the totality of their agenda is a kind of deception, at least self-deception.
I mean if it’s a relatively tiny number of people affected, why enact the law at all?
A modest proposal: I think that any legislator who votes yes on an abortion restriction and any governor or president who signs such a bill should be required to adopt a child at random from among current permanent wards of the state. You want forced pregnancy, you get forced adoption. It would be cruel to the child, but no less than being born unwanted.
It’s a purely political move designed to placate religious single issue voters.
I don’t think that’s true, unless the politicians in question (including Kasich) are just lying about being pro-life. They want to ban abortions. That’s what pro-life means.
At the present time, there are no moderate Republicans of a national stature or of a high enough state/local stature that I am aware of them. The moderates left, or lost primaries, or were just generally pushed aside/put out to pasture.
The last national-level Republicans that I can think of as moderates by a reasonable definition were McCain prior to 2008 and Bob Dole.
That’s the problem: the current GOP just doesn’t have a moderate wing. It has a “conservative by reasonable definition” wing which includes Kasich and a few others, and it has pro-wealth-and-pro-power-at-any-cost leadership (McConnell et. al.) and the bulk of the GOP voters are more tribal / anti-liberal / xenophobic / “racially conservative” than anything else. There is no moderate wing.
What exactly made them moderate?
I feel like in the past, moderates from both parties could make deals that had some things they wanted and some things they weren’t crazy about, but things got done that the right wanted, and things that the left wanted. Now nobody on the right will compromise about anything at all - they just cheat (gerrymander, stuff the ballot boxes, disenfranchise however they can, stack the courts, etc) until they can pass what they want to and say to hell with anyone not on board with them. The dems would compromise about lots of things - they passed a health care plan that was originally devised by the right after all, but they have been met with a brick wall for the last 20ish years due to GOP fear of the far right wing of their party (as best I can tell).
You just lost a pretty large amount of credibility with me based on that attitude Timex. I’m sorry, I try to be a “big tent liberal” and welcome a diverse range of views but you are apparently perfectly comfortable with legally treating half the population like second class citizens who cannot make decisions about their reproduction because it “doesn’t have much impact on” you.
I am not down with that.
You should probably do your best to alienate me because I’m not suitably liberal and don’t agree with you on every issue. Especially ones like this, where I don’t even disagree with you, but rather it just isn’t the most important issue to me.
For anyone who used to be anti-abortion, not using abortion as a metric to vote is certainly a good. I used to be vehemently anti-abortion, and then I realized it’s not the government’s place to dictate what a woman does with her body. Worse, if there is no God, then all this anti-abortion stuff is purely a ploy to keep women down and keep religious numbers up.
Plus we all know how hypocritical men are. If men had babies, abortion would be legal.